Saturday, January 13, 2007

Rank The Climate Experts

The current issue of Newsweek puts the question "What is causing this winter's strange weather? El Niño or global warming?’" to a panel of nine experts. Click on the buttons and decide which one gives the most convincing response?

7 comments:

Citoyen Dion is a Dud . .
said...

my choice

Just when you were starting to believe that variations in the amount of energy coming from the sun weren’t responsible for much of the observed surface warming during the past 20 years, comes along a paper in Geophysical Research Letters from two researchers at Duke University, Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West, that concludes otherwise:

We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45–50% of the 1900–2000 global warming, and 25–35% of the 1980–2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted.

These results, if they are indeed legitimate extensions of Scafetta's earlier work, do not refute the existance of human induced GW. It may mean we have a little more time to work with, or not. It does not mean we should not act now.

This article discusses what Scafetta and West did wrong:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/solar-variability-statistics-vs-physics-2nd-round/

and it notes "S&W combined two different types of data, and it is well-known that such combinations in themselves may introduces spurious trends. The paper does not address this question." and it concludes, with links: "We have alread discussed the connection between solar activity (here , here, here, and here), and this new analysis does not alter our previous conclusions: that there is not much evidence pointing to the sun being responsible for the warming since the 1950s."

"the truth is out there..." if you read what real scientists have to say, you would know that they consider all sorts of forcings and feedbacks that affect climate change. However, they know that human activity has caused the recent increase in CO2, as explained here:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87

and here:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/06/how-much-of-the-recent-cosub2sub-increase-is-due-to-human-activities/